Maggie's Breakfast by Gabriel Walsh

Author:Gabriel Walsh [Walsh, Gabriel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781842235348
Publisher: Poolbeg Press

The next morning I lingered in bed because I couldn’t stop smelling my old bed blanket. It was an experience I was glad to be having again. For years it had been the only thing that had reminded me of myself. Holding it close to my nose was like hugging and kissing a friend. My mother was at the seven o’clock Mass and I knew I had a bit of time to think about the journey I had taken. Minutes later I could hear the church bells ringing for the eight o’clock Mass. The sound of the bells would signal the arrival of John Joe One-Ball, an old man who fancied himself a singer in the mode of Bing Crosby. He always showed up in the middle of the street. He appeared to be singing ballads he didn’t know the words to. The man was a regular on Saturdays. He wore two different kinds of shoes on his feet and a rag of an overcoat on his back. When he bent down to pick up the few coins that were thrown to him, the holes in the seat of his trousers exposed a dirty crusty bottom. People called him John Joe One-Ball because he had only one testicle. I don’t know how they knew that about him, but that’s the name he had. A neighbour said it was because he attempted to sing high notes too often. When he reached for a high note he put his hand between his legs and held himself until the high note passed. When John Joe’s voice faded I knew he had gone on to the next street.

After a minute of silence I jumped out of bed and got dressed as quickly as I could. I didn’t want my mother to find me in the house when she came home. Grabbing a crusty bread slice that was left on the kitchen table I exited the house as quickly and as quietly as I could. I made my way towards the church in case I bumped into my mother. If she saw me heading in that direction she’d think I was going to Mass.

As I got to the church two elderly sisters who lived down the street from me overtook me and passed me by in a hurry. They looked like they were running for their lives. They had a reputation of being the first to enter the church to attend Mass. They walked past me waving their hands in unison as if they were greeting everybody who passed them. The two sisters were rarely seen. They stayed home most of the time with their widowed father who was a foreman at the foundry. Mass seemed to be the women’s only form of recreation. The parish priest, before he was exiled to Donegal, said the girls were suffering from ‘Saint Vitus Dance’. In hindsight I came to realise that the stories I heard about Saint Vitus were probably made up to compensate for the lack

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